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Monday, November 17, 2014

Diriomo Critters, A Little Miracle, and Suits

This tree is just on the side of the small dirt road to Diriomo, and it is soooo cool!
The tree is hollow all the way up inside, and when we first crawled in,
all of these bats flew out of the tree cave -- scared the crap out of me!

First off, I would like to give a shout out to my sister, Erin, to say Happy Birthday today! And to my parents happy anniversary!

A pic of the small dirt road through the jungle on our way to Diriomo.

OK for my week.... I wasn't even in my area for more than half of it!!! On Tuesday, for Zone Leader business with my companion, we went to Las Flores, BUT then on Wednesday through Friday, we went to Diriomo again (about 14 km south of Masaya), and this time we stayed a couple of nights with the Elders there, so I was actually in Diriomo for 3 days and 2 nights. It was really fun, though and I got to work with a few different Elders there. However, the house that we stayed in is really infested with spiders and scorpions, so it was a little scary. They have these big tarantulas and the Elders there showed me pictures of the HUGE scorpions that have been in their house! And right after we were all talking about this, we pulled out the mattress-things to sleep on (not comfortable at all, by the way...) and there was a HUGE spider on it and a bunch of eggs. We squished the spider and the eggs, but then a bunch of baby spiders spewed out of them allllll over the mattress. Needless to say, Elder Castro slept on somthing else that night LOL.

These little guys are everywhere here in Nicaragua, and this is just
a baby one. The locals say that they are not deadly, but they will
make you sick for days if you get stung by their tail.

All in all, working in Diriomo was super fun and it's a looot cooler there temperature-wise. The cooler temperatures felt super good at night and in the mornings. When we returned to our area, it was weird not having seen our investigators for so many days. Elders Mehmetoff and Sanchez had stayed back in our area to keep things going, but they only could do half the work we all normally do. So, in the end, only about 2ish days in our own area this week!!!

Sunset through the jungle in Diriomo -- Paradise!

Alright, now for some of the interesting stuff. So we found out that one of our investigators, well, .... I guess he actually puts little children on the black market! Our Bishop had to tell us when we had this guy's name on our investigator list, which is too bad because the guy was actually progressing with the lessons. Apparently he has worked with the missionaries here before, and he was progressing at that time also, but he deals children around the world. Scary, and sad...so that was rather unusual this week.

Kind of strange, but just about every other day, there is some sort
of parade in the middle of the street here in Masaya, with a band that
follows and plays really loud music, and the people will just get up
and start walking in it, and this one even had a little float with a
bunch of guys carrying it. I don't know why they do it, but
it's kinda cool!

On Sunday, we had a cool little miracle!! SO we do our ¨mission train¨ every Sunday, where we go through our area and pick up people to come with us on our way to church, and it is usually VERY UNsuccesful. As usual, our investigators mysteriously weren't home or couldn't go, but in our last stop at an investigator's house, we walked past a guy sitting in a lawn chair on the side of the road with his little daughter in his lap. As we passed by, he actually shouted something at me along the lines of ¨Hey, how's the view up there, chellie?¨ So by now I am pretty used to stupid stuff like that, and brushed it off. We then went to the investigator's house, and of course, they weren't home, and we almost had to go to church bringing NO one with us (which is really bad)! BUT, I felt a prompting to ask that guy in the lawn chair to come with us...even though he called me out...so as we walked back past him again, and without even telling Elder Castro to stop, I just started talking to him....AND HE SAID YES!!! He went with us, and brought his daughter. It was his first time in the church ever, but he was very comfortable because HE HAS FRIENDS in our branch! He didn't even have to sit with us because he sat by a really good friend of his, and he even had all these people come up and say 'hello' to him and his daughter, and it was a suuuper cool experience! He went to our Sunday School class that the missionaries teach and he took a ¨Gospel Principles¨manual to read, and we will be visiting him twice this week....incredible!! So that was my cool story this week -- a small little prompting and now we have a very encouraging investigator!!!!

ALSO Id like to give a report on my Spanish...nobody believes I'm in training! My Spanish has been improving sooo much! I can understand almost everything now and I can talk to everyone!! I'm so happy!! Not very much frustration anymore in that. Now, I still have a lot to learn about being a missionary, but I feel soooo good about my Spanish! All the people that I talk to always ask me about my height, where I'm from, and what not, and as I am talking to them, they don't believe that I have been here in Nicaragua for barely only one month!! I'm really starting to enjoy the work more as I'm starting to know everyone better and making friends and knowing my area. It took some getting used to, but I did it!!

Last, even though it is so incredibly hot here, we wore our suits yesterday to church just to switch it up. During our train misional, as we walked around our area picking up people to go to church, we got some very interesting looks and everyone was staring at us because no one has a suit here!!! And because it was so hot, it was kind of fun for our investigators, and the members were so impressed with us. Sure got everyone's attention!